Abstract

A wide variety of treatment protocols have been employed in high intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) treatments, and the resulting bioeffects observed include both mechanical as well as thermal effects. In recent studies, there has been significant interest in generating purely mechanical damage using protocols with short, microsecond pulses. Tissue erosion
effects have been attained by operating HIFU sources using short pulses of 10–20 cycles, low duty cycles (<1%), and pulse average intensities of greater than
The goal of this work was to use a modified pulsing protocol, consisting of longer, millisecond‐long pulses of ultrasound and to demonstrate that heating and rapid millisecond boiling from shock wave formation can be harnessed to induce controlled mechanical destruction of soft tissue. Experiments were performed in excised bovine liver and heart tissue using a 2‐MHz transducer. Boiling activity was monitored during exposures using a high voltage probe in parallel with the HIFU source. In situ acoustic fields and heating rates were determined for exposures using a novel derating approach for nonlinear HIFU fields. Several different exposure protocols were used and included varying the duty cycle, pulse length, and power to the source. After exposures, the tissue was sectioned, and the gross lesion morphology was observed. Different types of lesions were induced in experiments that ranged from purely thermal to purely mechanical depending on the pulsing protocol used. Therefore, shock wave
heating and millisecond boiling may be an effective method for reliably generating significant tissue erosion
effects.